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The Real Adventure by Henry Kitchell Webster

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She laughed again as she answered his question. "The deception was that
I pretended to do it from principle. The real reason why I wouldn't pay
another fare, is because I had only one more nickel."

"Good lord!" said the man.

"And," she went on, "that nickel will pay my fare home on the elevated.
It's only about half a mile to the station, but from there home it's
ten. So you see I'd rather walk this than that."

"But that's dreadful," he cried. "Isn't there ... Couldn't you let
me ..."

"Oh," she said, "it isn't so bad as that. It's just one of the silly
things that happen to you sometimes, you know. I didn't have very much
money when I started, it being Friday. And then I paid my subscription
to _The Maroon_...." She didn't laugh audibly, but without seeing her
face, he knew she smiled, the quality of her voice enriching itself
somehow.... "And I ate a bigger lunch than usual, and that brought me
down to ten cents. I could have got more of course from anybody, but ten
cents, except for that conductor, would have been enough."

"You will make a complaint about that, won't you?" he urged. "Even if it
wasn't on principle that you refused to pay another fare? And let me
back you up in it. I've his number, you know."

"You deserve that, I suppose," she said, "because you did get off the
car on principle. But--well, really, unless we could prove that I did
pay my fare, by some other passenger, you know, they'd probably think
the conductor did exactly right. Of course he took hold of me, but that
was because I was going right by him. And then, think what I did to
him!"

He grumbled that this was nonsense--the man had been guilty at least of
excessive zeal--but he didn't urge her, any further, to complain.

"There's another car coming," he now announced, peering around the end
of the wall. "You will let me pay your fare on it, won't you?"

She hesitated. The rain was thinning. "I would," she said, "if I
honestly wouldn't rather walk. I'm wet through now, and it'll be
pleasanter to--walk a little of it off than to squeeze into that car.
Thanks, really very, very much, though. Don't _you_ miss it." She thrust
out her hand. "Good-by!"

"I can't pretend to think you need an escort to the elevated," he said.
"I saw what you did to the conductor. I haven't the least doubt you
could have thrown him off the car. But I'd--really like it very much if
you would let me walk along with you."

"Why," she said, "of course! I'd like it too. Come along."




CHAPTER III

FREDERICA'S PLAN AND WHAT HAPPENED TO IT


At twenty minutes after seven that evening, Frederica Whitney was about
as nearly dressed as she usually was ten minutes before the hour at
which she had invited guests to dinner--not quite near enough dressed to
prevent a feeling that she had to hurry.

Ordinarily, though, she didn't mind. She'd been an acknowledged beauty
for ten years and the fact had ceased to be exciting. She took it rather
easily for granted, and knowing what she could do if she chose, didn't
distress herself over being lighted up, on occasions, to something a
good deal less than her full candle-power. To Frederica at thirty--or
thereabout--the job of being a radiantly delightful object of regard
lacked the sporting interest of uncertainty; was almost too simple a
matter to bother about.

But to-night the tenseness of her movements and the faint trace of a
wire edge in the tone in which she addressed the maid, revealed the fact
that she wished she'd started half an hour earlier. Even her husband
discovered it. He brought in a cigarette, left the door open behind him
and stood smiling down at her with the peculiarly complacent look that
characterizes a married man of forty when he finds himself dressed
beyond cavil in the complete evening harness of civilization, ten
minutes before his wife.

She shot a glance of rueful inquiry at him--"Now what have _you_ come
fussing around for?" would be perhaps a fair interpretation of it--and
asked him what time it was, in the evident hope that the boudoir clock
on her dressing-table had deceived her. It had, but in the wrong
direction.

"Seven twenty-two, thirty-six," he told her. It was a perfectly harmless
passion he had for minute divisions of time, but to-night it irritated
her. He might have spared her that thirty-six seconds.

She made no comment except with her eyebrows, but he must have been
looking at her, for he wanted to know, good-humoredly, what all the
excitement was about.

"You could go down as you are and not a man here to-night would know the
difference. And as for the women--well, if they have something on you
for once, they'll be all the better pleased."

"Don't try to be knowing and philosophical, and--Havelock Ellish,
Martin, dear," she admonished him, pending a minute operation with an
infinitesimal hairpin. "It isn't your lay a bit. Just concentrate your
mind on one thing, and that's being nice to Hermione Woodruff...."

She broke off for a long stare into her hand-glass; then finished,
casually, "... and on seeing that Roddy is."

He asked, "Why Rodney?" in a tone that matched hers; looked at her,
widened his eyes, said "Huh!" to himself and, finally, shook his head.
"Nothing to it," he pronounced.

She said, "Nothing to what?" but abandoned this position as untenable.
She despatched the maid with the key to the wall safe in her husband's
room. "Why isn't there?" she demanded. "Rodney won't look at young
girls. They bore him to death--and no wonder, because he freezes them
perfectly brittle with fright. But Hermione's really pretty intelligent.
She can understand fully half the things he talks about and she's clever
enough to pretend about the rest. She's got lots of tact and skill,
she's good-looking and young enough--no older than I and I'm two years
younger than Roddy. She'll appreciate a real husband, after having been
married five years to John Woodruff. And she's rich enough, now, so that
his wild-eyed way of practising law won't matter."

"All very nice and reasonable," he conceded, "but somehow the notion of
Rodney Aldrich trying to marry a rich widow is one I'm not equal to
without a handicap of at least two cocktails." He looked at his watch
again. "By the way, didn't you say he was coming early?"

She nodded. "That's what he told me this morning when I telephoned him
to remind him that it was to-night. He said he had something he wanted
to talk to me about. I knew I shouldn't have a minute, but I didn't say
so because I thought if he tried to get here early, he might miss being
late."

They heard, just then, faint and far-away, the ring of the door-bell, at
which she cried, "Oh, dear! There's some one already."

"Wait a second," he said. "Let's see if it's him."

The paneled walls and ceiling of their hall were very efficient
sounding-boards and there was no mistaking the voice they heard speaking
the moment the door opened--a voice with a crisp ring to it that sounded
always younger than his years. What he said didn't matter, just a
cheerful greeting to the butler. But what they heard the butler say to
him was disconcerting.

"You're terribly wet, sir."

Frederica turned on her husband a look of despair.

"He didn't come in a taxi! He's walked or something, through that rain!
Do run down and see what he's like. And if he's very bad, send him up to
me. I can imagine how he'll look."

She was mistaken about that though. For once Frederica had overestimated
her powers, stimulated though they were by the way she heard her husband
say, "Good lord!" when the sight of his brother-in-law burst on him.

"Praise heaven you can wear my clothes," she heard him add. "Run along
up-stairs and break yourself gently to Freddy."

She heard him come squudging up the stairs and along the hall, and then
in her doorway she saw him. His baggy gray tweed suit was dark with the
water that saturated it. The lower part of his trousers-legs, in
irregular vertical creases, clung dismally to his ankles and toned down
almost indistinguishably into his once tan boots by the medium of a
liberal stipple of mud spatters. Evidently, he had worn no overcoat.
Both his side pockets had been, apparently, strained to the utmost to
accommodate what looked like a bunch of pasteboard-bound note-books,
now far on the way to their original pulp, and lopped despondently
outward. A melancholy pool had already begun forming about his feet.

The maddening, but yet--though she hadn't much room for any other
emotion--touching thing about the look of him, was the way his face,
above the dismal wreck, beamed good-humored innocent affection at her.
It was a big featured, strong, rosy face, and the unmistakable
intellectual power of it, which became apparent the moment he got his
faculties into action, had a trick of hiding, at other times, behind a
mere robust simplicity.

"Good gracious!" he said. "I didn't know you were going to have a
party."

It seemed though, he didn't want to make an issue of that. He hedged. "I
know you said something about a birthday cake, but I thought it would
just be the family. So instead of dressing, I thought I'd walk down from
home. It takes about the same time. And then it came on to rain, so I
took a street-car--and got put off."

It appeared from the way she echoed his last two words that she wanted
an explanation. He was painting with a large brush and a few details got
obliterated.

"Got into a row with the conductor, who wanted to collect two fares for
one ride, so I walked over to the elevated--and back, and here I am."

"Yes, here you are," said Frederica.

She didn't mean anything by that. Already she was making up her mind
what she would do with him. His own suggestion was that he should decamp
furtively by the back stairs, the sound of new arrivals to the dinner
party warning him that the other way of escape was barred. Waiters could
be instructed to rescue his hat for him, and he could toddle along
down-town again.

She didn't give him time to complete the outline of this masterly
stratagem. "Don't be impossible, Rod," she said. "Don't you even know
whose birthday party this is?"

He looked at her, frowned, then laughed. He had a great big laugh.

"I thought it was one of the kid's," he said.

"Well, it isn't," she told him. "It's yours. And those people down there
were asked to meet you. And you've got just about seven minutes to get
presentable in. Go into Martin's bathroom and take off those horrible
clothes. I'll send Walters in to lay out some things of Martin's."

She came up to him and, at arm's length, touched him with cautious
finger-tips. "And do, please, there's a dear boy," she pleaded, "hurry
as fast as you can, and then come down and be as nice as you can"--she
hesitated--"especially to Hermione Woodruff. She thinks you're a wonder
and I don't want her to be disappointed."

"The widdy?" he asked. "Sure I'll be nice to her."

She looked after him rather dubiously as he disappeared in the direction
of her husband's room.

She'd have felt safer about him if he had seemed more subdued as a
result of his escapade. There was a sort of hilarious contentment about
him that filled her with misgivings.

Well, they were justified!

But the maddening thing was, she had afterward to admit, that the
disaster had been largely of her own contriving. She had been caught in
the net of her own stratagem--hoist by her own petard.

She had made it a six-couple dinner in order to insure that the talk
should be by twos rather than general, and she had spent a good
half-hour over the place-cards, getting them to suit her.

Hermione had to be on Martin's right hand, of course. She was just back
in the city after an absence of years, and everybody was rushing her.
She put Violet Williamson, whom Martin was always flirting with in a
harmless way, on his left, and Rod to the right of Hermione. At Rodney's
right, she put a girl he had known for years and cared nothing whatever
about, and then Howard West--who probably wasn't interested in her
either, but would be polite because he was to everybody. Frederica
herself sat between Carl Leaventritt of the university--a great
acquisition, since whatever you might think of him as an empirical
psychologist, there was no doubt of his being an accomplished
diner-out--and Violet's husband, as he vociferously proclaimed himself,
John Williamson, an untired business man who, had their seasons
coincided, could have enjoyed a ball game in the afternoon and stayed
awake at the opera in the evening. Doctor Randolph's pretty wife she
slid in between Leaventritt and Howard West, and, in happy ignorance of
what the result was going to be, she put Randolph himself between Violet
and Alice West. He was a young, up-to-the-minute mind and nerve doctor.

It was an admirable plan all right, the key-note of it being, as you no
doubt will have observed, the easy unforced isolation of Rodney and the
rich widow. Before that dinner was over, they ought to be old friends.

And, for a little while, all went well. Rodney came down almost within
the seven minutes she had allowed him, looking much less dreadful than
she had expected, in her husband's other dress suit, and not forgetful,
it appeared, of the line of behavior she had enjoined on him; namely,
that he was to be nice to Hermione Woodruff.

From her end of the table, she saw them apparently safely launched in
conversation over the hors-d'oeuvre, took a look at them during the soup
to see that all was still well, then let herself be beguiled into a
conversation with John Williamson, whom she liked as well as Martin did
Violet. She never thought of the objects of her matrimonial design again
until her ear was caught by a huge seven-cornered word in her brother's
voice. He couldn't be saying it to Hermione; no, he was leaning forward,
shouting at Doctor Randolph, who apparently knew what he meant and was
getting visibly ready to reply in kind.

According to Violet Williamson's account, given confidentially in the
drawing-room afterward, it was really Hermione's fault. "She just
wouldn't let Rodney alone--would keep talking about crime and Lombroso
and psychiatric laboratories--I'll bet she'd got hold of a paper of his
somewhere and read it. Anyway, at last she said, 'I believe Doctor
Randolph would agree with me.' He was talking to me then, but maybe that
isn't why she did it. Well, and Rodney straightened up and said, 'Is
that Randolph, the alienist!' You see he hadn't caught his name when
they were introduced. And that's how it started. Hermione was game--I'll
admit that. She listened and kept looking interested, and every now and
then said something. Sometimes they'd take the trouble to smile and say
'Yes, indeed!'--politely, you know, but other times they wouldn't pay
any attention at all, just roll along over her and smash her flat--like
what's his name--Juggernaut."

"You don't need to tell me that," said Frederica. "All I didn't know was
how it started. Didn't I sit there and watch for a mortal hour, not able
to do a thing? I tried to signal to Martin, but of course he wasn't
opposite to me and ..."

"He did all he could, really," Violet answered her. "I told him to go to
the rescue, and he did, bravely. But what with Hermione being so miffy
about getting frozen out, and Martin himself being so interested in what
they were shouting at each other--because it was frightfully
interesting, you know, if you didn't have to pretend you understood
it--why, there wasn't much he could do."

In the light of this disaster, she was rather glad the men lingered in
the dining-room as long as they did--glad that Hermione had ordered her
car for ten and took the odd girl with her. She made no effort to resist
the departure of the others, with reasonable promptitude, in their
train. When, after the front door had closed for the last time, Martin
released a long yawn, she told him to run along to bed; she wanted to
talk with Rodney, who was to spend the night while his own clothes were
drying out in the laundry.

"Good night, old chap," said Martin in accents of lively commiseration,
"I'm glad I'm not in for what you are."




CHAPTER IV

ROSALIND STANTON DOESN'T DISAPPEAR


Rodney found a pipe of his that he kept concealed on the premises,
loaded and lighted it, sat down astride a spindling little chair that
looked hardly up to his weight, settled his elbows comfortably on the
back of it, and then asked his sister what Martin had meant--what was he
in for?

Frederica, curled up in a corner of the sofa, finished her own train of
thought aloud, first.

"She's awfully attractive, don't you think? His wife, I mean. Oh, James
Randolph's, of course." She turned to Rodney, looked at him at first
with a wry pucker between her eyebrows, then with a smile, and finally
answered his question. "Nothing," she said. "I mean, I was going to
scold you, but I'm not."

"Why, yes," he admitted through his smoke. "Randolph's wife's a mighty
pretty woman. But I expect that lets her out, doesn't it?"

Frederica shook her head. "She's a good deal of a person, I should say,
on the strength of to-night's showing. She kept her face perfectly
through the whole thing--didn't try to nag at him or apologize to the
rest of us. I'd like to know what she's saying to him now."

Then, "Oh, I was furious with you an hour ago," she went on. "I'd made
such a nice, reasonable, really beautiful plan for you, and given you a
tip about it, and then I sat and watched you in that thoroughgoing way
of yours, kicking it all to bits. But somehow, when I see you all by
yourself, this way, it changes things. I get to thinking that perhaps my
plan was silly after all--anyhow, it was silly to make it. The plan was,
of course, to marry you off to Hermione Woodruff."

He turned this over in his deliberate way, during the process of
blowing two or three smoke rings, began gradually to grin, and said at
last, "That was some plan, little sister. How do you think of things
like that? You ought to write romances for the magazines, that's what
you ought to do."

"I don't know," she objected. "If reasonableness counted for anything in
things like that, it was a pretty good plan. It would have to be
somebody like Hermione. You can't get on at all with young girls. As
long as you remember they're around, you're afraid to say anything
except milk and water out of a bottle that makes them furious, and then
if you forget whom you're talking to and begin thinking out loud,
developing some idea or other, you--simply paralyze them.

"Well, Hermione's sophisticated and clever, she's lived all over the
place; she isn't old yet, and she was a brick about that awful husband
of hers--never made any fuss--bluffed it out until he, luckily, died. Of
course she'll marry again, and I just thought, if you liked the idea, it
might as well be you."

"I don't know," said Rodney, "whether Mrs. Woodruff knows what she wants
or not, but I do. She wants a run for her money--a big house to live in
three months in the year, with a flock of servants and a fleet of
motor-cars, and a string of what she'll call cottages to float around
among, the rest of the time. And she'll want a nice, tame, trick husband
to manage things for her and be considerate and affectionate and
amusing, and, generally speaking, Johnny-on-the-spot whenever she wants
him. If she has sense enough to know what she wants in advance, it will
be all right. She can take her pick of dozens. But if she gets a
sentimental notion in her head--and I've a hunch that she's subject to
them--that she wants a real man, with something of his own to do,
there'll be, saving your presence, hell to pay. And if the man happened
to be me ...!"

Frederica stretched her slim arms outward. Thoughtful-faced, she made no
comment on his analysis of the situation, unless a much more observant
person than Rodney might have imagined there was one in the deliberate
way in which she turned her rings, one at a time, so that the brilliant
masses of gems were inside, and then clenched her hands over them.

He had got up and was ranging comfortably up and down the room.

"I know I look more or less like a nut to the people who've always known
us--father's and mother's friends, and most of their children. But I
give you my word, Freddy, that most of them look like nuts to me. Why,
they live in curiosity shops--so many things around, things they have
and things they've got to do, that they can't act or think for fear of
breaking something.

"Why a man should load himself up with three houses and a yacht, a
stable of motor-cars, and God knows what besides, when he's rich enough
to buy himself real space and leisure to live in, is a thing I can't
figure out on any basis except of defective intelligence. I suppose
they're equally puzzled about me when I refuse a profitable piece of law
work they've offered me, because I don't consider it interesting. All
the same, I get what I want, and I'm pretty dubious sometimes whether
they do. I want space--comfortable elbow room, so that if I happen to
get an idea by the tail, I can swing it around my head without knocking
over the lamp."

"It's a luxury though, Rod, that kind of spaciousness, and you aren't
very rich. If you married a girl without anything ..."

He broke in on her with that big laugh of his. "You've kept your sense
of humor pretty well, sis, considering you've been married all these
years to a man as rich as Martin, but don't spring remarks like that, or
I'll think you've lost it. If a man can't keep an open space around him,
even after he's married, on an income, outside of what he can earn, of
ten or twelve thousand dollars a year, the trouble isn't with his
income. It's with the content of his own skull."

She gave a little shiver and snuggled closer into a big down pillow.

"You will marry somebody, though, won't you, Roddy? I'll try not to nag
at you and I won't make any more silly plans, but I can't help worrying
about you, living alone in that awful big old house. Anybody but you
would die of despondency."

"Oh," he said, "that's what I meant to talk to you about! I sold it
to-day--fifty thousand dollars--immediate possession. Man wants to build
a printing establishment there. You come down sometime next week and
pick out all the things you think you and Harriet would like to keep,
and I'll auction off the rest."

She shivered again and, to her disgust, found that her eyes were
blurring up with tears. She was a little bit slack and edgy to-day,
anyhow.

But really there was something rather remorseless about Rodney. It
occurred to her that the woman he finally did marry would need to be
strong and courageous and rather insensitive to sentimental fancies, to
avoid a certain amount of unhappiness.

What he had just referred to in a dozen brisk words, was the final
disappearance of the home they had all grown up in. Their father, one of
Chicago's great men during the twenty great years between the Fire and
the Fair, had built it when the neighborhood included nearly all the
other big men of that robust period, and had always been proud of it.
There was hardly a stone or stick about it that hadn't some tender happy
association for her. Of course for years the neighborhood had been
impossible. Her mother had clung to it after her husband's death, as was
of course natural.

But when she had followed him, a year ago now, it was evident that the
old place would have to go. Rodney, who had lived alone with her there,
had simply stayed on, since her death, waiting for an offer for it that
suited him. Frederica had known that, of course--had worried about him,
as she said, and in her imagination, had colored his loneliness to the
same dismal hue her own would have taken on in similar circumstances.

All the same, his curt announcement that the long-looked-for change had
come, brought up quick unwelcomed tears. She squeezed them away with her
palms.

"You'll come to us then, won't you?" she asked, but quite without
conviction. She knew what he'd say.

"Heavens, no! Oh, I'll go to a hotel for a while--maybe look up a
little down-town apartment, with a Jap. It doesn't matter much about
that. It's a load off, all right."

"Is that," she asked, "why you've been looking so sort of--gay, all the
evening--as if you were licking the last of the canary's feathers off
your whiskers?"

"Perhaps so," he said. "It's been a pretty good day, take it all round."

She got up from the couch, shook herself down into her clothes a little,
and came over to him.

"All right, since it's been a good day, let's go to bed." She put her
hands upon his shoulders. "You're rather dreadful," she said, "but
you're a dear. You don't bite my head off when I urge you to get
married, though I know you want to. But you will some day--I don't mean
bite my head off--won't you, Rod?"

"When I see any prospect of being as lucky as Martin--find a girl who
won't mind when I turn up for dinner looking like a drowned tramp, or
kick her plans to bits, after she's tipped me off as to what she wants
me to do ..."

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